"our [email] correspondence would certainly have included every number or code that was important to us – credit card numbers, bank-account information, medical info, and any other sensitive data you can imagine."
Oh, boy. would "certainly have included"? Why? I have been using email for 15 years and have never emailed, nor received via email, any credit card number, bank details nor sensitive data of any kind. Why would you even send these via email? More specifically, why would anyone send them to you via email - or maybe that's how banks roll in the US, which would be pretty insane to be honest.
And as Jose pointed out above, the most likely scenario is not that the hacker was able to guess or brute force the password, but managed a session hijack - circumstantial evidence - the user's experience with gmail was sluggish - [badly written] injected script-kiddy exploit, maybe...no authentication system will save you then because the phone call is coming from inside the house, dun dun DUN!!!
I get that it will stop some hackers. But not as many as you might think. The cynic in me says that this is just another way for Google to get people's mobile numbers.

It's only a matter of time until your email gets hacked. Don't believe me? Just read this harrowing cautionary tale. When [my wife] came back to her desk, half an hour later, she couldn’t log into Gmail at all. By that time, I was up and looking at e‑mail, and we both quickly saw what the re...

Well since most of us are actually coding against frameworks that are very abstracted from the actual "computer" upon which they reside, I don't think any of this kind of stuff strictly counts as computer programming...
Whilst I would agree with Jeff that this drive will not necessarily make good problem solvers (afaic, programming starts and ends on paper; anything else is just an implementation detail) and is perhaps more likely to end up producing Schleimels than anything else, I would also point out that if you throw enough mud at a wall, some of it will surely stick and as a way to perhaps encourage people to see if they are ready to try it for "real" - people who for example are already programmers (just not computer programmers - anyone who has ever designed any kind of a process is already a problem-solver) then I say, why not?
If nothing else it might help to de-mystify the profession and help someone to express their ability in something other than human language.
On the flip side; a part of me is scared that someday I'll have to deal with a client who is convinced I can build a facebook clone in a week because they can "debug HTML, it's not that hard" :)

I didn't intend for Please Don't Learn to Code to be so controversial, but it seemed to strike a nerve. Apparently a significant percentage of readers stopped reading at the title. So I will open with my own story. I think you'll find it instructive. My mom once told me that the only reaso...

FizzBuzz won't tell you if a person can actually program, but it can tell you how a person thinks as well as how much experience they really have - after all, if kids can play the game correctly then it's not a hard problem. But if for example if someone started to writing this (pseudo code):
function Fizz (number integer) returns boolean
if (number mod 3 == 0) return true else false
end function
function Buzz(number integer) returns boolean
if (number mod 5 == 0) return true else false
end function
function FizzBuzz(number integer) returns boolean
return Fizz(number) AND Buzz(number)
end function
I would instantly know that they are a programmer, regardless of whether they even get time to finish the main program. Because of the approach they took.
Similarly, if I asked someone to do this in SQL and they asked me "well can I use a tally table" then right away I'd know that they would go on to write a set based solution as opposed to a loop or a cursor, meaning they were experienced, even if they never actually got the right solution in the interview.

I find it difficult to believe, but the reports keep pouring in via Twitter and email: many candidates who show up for programming job interviews can't program. At all. Consider this recent email from Mike Lin: The article Why Can't Programmers... Program? changed the way I did interviews. I ...